Arctic Gold by Stephen Coonts Page B

He was chief of staff for the current Director of the NSA and would be especially sensitive to possible political repercussions.
I gather a protest was filed this morning with our embassy in Moscow, Rubens told him. I’ll be going in to talk with people about the situation later this afternoon.
People, Dean thought, meant either the National Security Advisor or the President himself. There would be
brutal questions, perhaps a formal investigation. Dean did not envy his boss.
We can always blame UFOs again, John Jacobin, one of the lawyers, pointed out.
There was a subdued chuckle from several of the men and women seated at the table. More than once, going back to the years of the Cold War, NSA and CIA incursions over Russian territory had been spotted but remained unidentified. The long- running popular mania over supposed alien spacecraft in the airspace of both the United States and Russia had on several occasions proven surprisingly useful.
We don’t yet know if the opposition got a good look at our aircraft, Rubens said mildly. It not really important, one way or another.
But Dean knew it was
important. A critical failure on an intelligence op inside Russia would inevitably spawn serious interagency trouble down the line. The CIA, especially, didn’t like the fact that the NSA was trespassing on what it considered its turf, its particular area of responsibility. Hell, they’d been trying to shut down Desk Three or get it transferred to their Directorate of Operations ever since its inception.
What is
important, Rubens continued, is that we secure our people over there, get them out safe, resolve Operation Magpie, and follow through with Operation Blue Jay. Miss DeFrancesca has provided us with a vital link between Magpie and Blue Jay. We need to take advantage of this before the trail goes cold. He nodded to one of the men at the table. Mr. Ryder, if you please?
Tom Ryder was the designated briefing officer for the morning meeting, a small and fussy analyst from the Russian Section. He stood up, took his place behind a lectern at the front of the room, and used a handheld remote
to bring up an image on the large flat- panel screen on the wall behind him.
The man face was shown full- front and profile, with numbers and Cyrillic lettering on a board in front of him. Two more photos showed what appeared to be surveillance photos of the same manon a street corner and at a table in a restaurant. The face was lined and heavily scarred. The photo taken in the restaurant showed him with his mouth open, displaying black and uneven teeth.
Ryder cleared his throat, then launched into his presentation without preamble. Victor Mikhaylov, he said. Agent DeFrancesca positively identified him as the leader of the gunmen at the warehouse. Mikhaylov, we believe, is the number- one enforcer for this
man, Grigor Kotenko.
Kotenko photographs replaced those of Mikhaylov. Where Mikhaylov had the look of a street rat, a thug, Kotenko looked smoother, more urbane, a businessman, perhaps, or a lawyer, with a thick walrus mustache and a cold- eyed squint.
This guy a real piece of work, Ryder said. When he was eighteen, he was sent to a gulag for armed robbery, kidnapping, and rape. While there, he made some important contacts within the Leningrad criminal underworld, and when he got out four years laterwith the help of a wealthy uncle in the Organizatsiyahe went to work for Vladimir Kumarin as an enforcer. We believe he was the triggerman in a particularly brutal murderof Peter Talbot, an American hotel entrepreneur who was shot ten times at point- blank range on a metro platform while surrounded by six hired bodyguards, no less. Seems Talbot had refused to share’ his partnership in a new hotel chain over there.
Since then, however, Kotenko has gone from enforcement to administration, working his way all the way up to
the top echelons of the Tambov organization. After Kumarin arrest by Moscow officials in 2007, Kotenko may have moved up to the